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Philip Kaplan Builds the Marketplace for Online Advertising

Written on
January 25th 2006
Author
by Kiran Aditham  |
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With the “King of All Media” playing kindred spirit, Kaplan watched as his own brash website became an instant phenomenon in 2000. F***edCompany earned Top Site awards from both Rolling Stone and Yahoo and subsequently vaulted its creator to celebrity status: Kaplan found himself featured in pop culture mags (like Details) and respected trades (like US News & World Report) alike. “It did spread way bigger than I thought it would,” he says, becoming increasingly distracted by the bevy of beautiful types passing by outside. “I knew people would think it was funny and that it would make the rounds. But I didn’t know it would get all the press attention. I didn’t know that it would really turn into a full-time business.”

Whatever you make of Kaplan’s sometimes goofy tendencies, it’s best never to mistake them for a lack of business acumen. He remains the same shrewd businessman who sold off his PK Interactive firm to his employees for approximately $350,000 so that he could turn his full attention to building F****edCompany.com into the online destination of millions of unique visitors. “At one point, F***edCompany.com became so popular, that I had the [option] to either focus on it or continue with my consulting company,” Kaplan explains. “F***edCompany was on the rise, so I said it would really be fun to ‘Be Pud’ for a living, and get to know what it’s like to be Howard Stern for six months. So I did that. I sold my consulting company to my employees, and figured out a revenue model for F***edCompany and got to be Pud for many years.”

During these glory years, Kaplan parlayed F***edCompany’s success into a bestselling spinoff novel: 2002’s F’d Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts, written during a frenzied three-month stay at the famed Chelsea Hotel. “The reason why I did that was so that every morning when I woke up, I’d remember why I was there,” he explains. “I would roll out of bed, write the book for twelve hours, and roll back into bed.”

The result of his hotel labor? F’d Companies landed on bestseller lists from Amazon.com to the LA Times. But in an ironic twist, the same dotcom community that Kaplan had become famous for skewering was quickly reemerging from the post-bust ruins, and turning once again into a viable commodity. Ever the opportunist, however, Kaplan already had a plan to revamp his website’s advertising model in place.

“Like any popular content site, there was a potential for advertising revenue,” he says. “So I worked with Fastclick, Doubleclick, and an outsourced sales team, trying every method. Some worked, and some didn’t. From all of the knowledge I gained doing this, I decided to create what I thought would be the ultimate way to sell ads.”

Kaplan’s brainstorm resulted in the formation of what would eventually become AdBrite—arguably the first online advertising “marketplace.” “It’s like eBay for advertising,” he explains. “Anybody who has ad space to sell can sell it on Adbrite, and anybody who wants to buy it can buy it. Lots of websites still do that, ‘Your Ad Here’, and it goes to some rate sheet with an email address. I made it go straight to a rate sheet where you could actually click on a product, upload your banner ad through the system, type in your credit card number, and be instantly charged for that ad—and that ad would instantly run on F***edCompany. The system worked so well, that on the first day, we totally sold out…like 12 ads or something, which is way more than any ad agency could ever sell.”



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Reader Comments.

“If there’s an advertiser who’s spending $.11 and making $.10, that seems to be our customer.”

Who would spend 11 cents to make 10? ;) typo?

Posted by Jason | 1:48 pm on January 26, 2006.

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